Total Politics 2010 Election Map

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Councillors back all-out local elections

 

Ben Duckworth

 

Councillors in England and Wales are emphatically in favour of all-out elections every four years, a ComRes survey for Total Politics reveals. The finding that 71% of councillors believe they should be elected as a whole indicates the failure of annual local elections to win support from those that the system elects.
When asked if councils should be elected as whole every four years, 71% of the councillors surveyed were in favour. Some 26% were against, while 3% offered no opinion. When the figures are broken down into parties, 62% of Labour councillors agreed, while 79% of Conservatives and 60% of Lib Dems also backed all-out elections. Interestingly, councillors from district councils were against electing councils as a whole, in contrast to other local authorities. Only 17% supported all-out elections compared to 77% of metropolitan councillors, 87% of county councillors and 67% of London councillors. The highest support came from independent councillors, with 88% wanting elections as a whole.
There are three options for local elections. Councils can either hold them all-out, meaning all of the councillors are elected every four years. Alternatively, half of the council can be elected every two years, or a third of the councillors go up for election every year for three years, with no elections in the fourth year. Around 10,000 candidates stood for 2,800 local government vacancies across England for the May 2008 local elections. The Electoral Commission believes this year's elections benefited from unchanged local election rules.
When asked for their views on annual elections for a third of the seats, only 25% of councillors came out in support, with 68% against. Highest support came from the Greens (46%) with Labour (36%), Lib Dems (34%) and Conservatives (16%) showing lower levels of support. Councillors were also surveyed on their attitude towards contesting half of council seats every two years. In total, 17% were supportive and 75% were against the measure.
Dr Phyllis Starkey, chair of Communities and Local Government Committee, supports annual elections. She says: "You get a constant renewal of the council. It encourages the councillors to remain in contact with their electorate because they know their colleagues are up for election every year. It strengthens accountability."
In the 2008 local elections, seven non-metropolitan district councils electing half of their councils in biennial elections held ballots. There were 107 district councils and 19 unitary authorities nationwide holding elections by thirds.
The regions most supportive of all-out elections were Wales (92%) and London (89%). Following these were East Midlands and the South West, with 82% of councillors in favour. The region with the highest proportion against all-out elections was the North West, with 53% disagreeing. West Midlands (41%), Yorkshire and Humberside (34%) and the North East (31%) also had high proportions against electing councils as a whole.
The Councillors Commission, set up by Ruth Kelly when she was at the Communities and Local Government Department, recommended all-out elections in its December 2007 report Representing the Future. This was ignored in Hazel Blears' recent white paper Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power.
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA and former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit, served on the Commission. He says: "The issue of all-out elections tends to divide those who care most about good local government and those who care most about strong local parties. For the former, it is hard to get good decision-making when administrations are usually only a few months away from having to defend themselves at the polls. It is bad for long-term decision-making and encourages councillors to duck unpopular or risky decisions. For party people, annual elections are a vital way of keeping the party on its toes and getting campaigners out on the doorsteps."
He continues: "In the end I side with the first group - partly because I care more about good councils than strong parties, but mainly because I don't actually think the best way to keep parties strong is to force members out in the chilly spring evenings to post propaganda through letter boxes or harass people to disclose their voting preferences."
Electoral turnout in English local elections reached an all-time low in 1998 when only 29% of the electorate chose to cast their vote. It rose to 62% and 64% in 2001 and 2005 respectively, but dropped to 36.5% in 2006.
Dr Starkey admits that the three different methods of electing councillors hasn't improved electoral turnout, but believes it still holds significant advantages. "When you have all-out elections," she says, "there's a huge temptation to concentrate on what's going in the council, safe in the view that you don't have to face the electorate for another three or four years. Councils can suddenly start communicating with the electorate again just before the election."
She concludes: "In areas where political control is contested, it also means that the ruling group has a bit of a tendency to take all the difficult decisions and then tread water for the next three years so as not to annoy anyone, and get re-elected. Hard decisions that may come up in the meantime can be put off until after the election - issues such as school reorganisation for example, when the responsible view would be to deal with such things as they arise."